The present invention relates to a safety device used in the detection of a conductive liquid in an enclosure to be monitored. It more generally applies to the field of monitoring and inspection of enclosures in which the presence of a liquid is undesirable or unacceptable.
More specifically, the present invention relates to the monitoring and inspection of enclosures in which operations or manipulations are carried out in an uninterrupted manner on products, and without any human supervision.
This is the case, for example in enclosures used in the nuclear industry and called "glove boxes", which are enclosures under a vacuum, within which radioactive products are permanently manipulated by robots and within which there are water circuits in which, for absolute safety reasons, it is vital to be able to immediately detect a leak as soon as it occurs, in order to prevent any contamination.
Hitherto, water leaks in enclosures have been detected by detection devices constituted by two single electrodes having two facing contacts, generally made from carbon, due to the fact that this resists chemical agents such as chlorine vapours, and directly energized from the mains. The electrodes are relatively large and are only relatively safe from the electrical standpoint. When the resistance between the two contacts is modified by the fact that the water to be detected establishes a bridge between them, an alarm and control circuit is triggered. Moreover, these known simple devices have the disadvantage of supplying no information in the case of a deterioration of the actual alarm circuit.